There's always an idiot side to anything. On the other side, you have the Free & Open Source Computer, of course. This is not quite home for the Mighty Penguins Tamers Club as you would probably have guessed.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A Quickie on Debian (and UBUNTU)

OK so the Fedora thing is flawed, mostly because the live disk not handling dependancies properly I agree, but yet I had to look in another direction.

A felt confident: Fedora7 was only the first of several distros on my desk awaiting to set itself on my new PC; reviewing them & choosing the best fit was supposed to be 80% pleasure and 20% learning interesting things.

Well, I learned some, indeed:

Debian install is exactly the same as the old ubuntu, prior to the live disk with an install icon on the desktop present favored strategy. Debian never reached my network hub, acknowledged only 2 out of three perfectly identical sata drives, and never entered Graphic Mode, saying in an error message that some xorg.conf file was faulty "no screen defined" - so far, OK, lets give it a look: at least I know where xorg.conf is (in /etc/X11), and I had the older desktop with openSUSE to compare with. Well, nothing was missing I am afraid to say, every item being defined & referenced in a seemingly logical way... sure some parameters where not the same, the very name of the items differing but straightforward... then, when it installed GRUB the bootloader on the HDD, it did not spotted FEDORA but only XP that the computer shop installed (for free, hum) on this new machine. Not only did I waste my time, but as well my previous install, grrrrrrrr.

So, we all know that debian is a great tool for others to develop on (and is always slightly late), so lets hop on to ubuntu 7.04, the most modern, up to date thingy, the one that's targeted to dumb users also. ubuntu, in live disk mode, was a tiny bit above: it gave me a graphical environnement, no network and three hard disks at least. Without the network, I dropped the ball since the fedora disk operated perfectly with my integrated network card, I assume it's not _that_ exotic. If ubuntu aims at being the easiest on earth, well, they have some way to go, still.

Enough for today, I am struggling with mounting permissions to be able to write to my other partitions in a fresh Fedora install. I tend to think I'll have to wait for openSUSE 10.3 to be released...